Sadly, that group in Oakland and San Francisco, out of sheer frustration or broken moral sense, are not looking for a movement to change the political landscape in this country, but simply for an opportunity to break things.

I bet they aren't even Damned fans.

The Lady with a Lamprey

"The powerful are exploiting people, art and ideas, and this leads to us plebes debating how to best ration ice.Man, no wonder they always win....." Lonesomebri

theCryptofishist wrote:Sadly, that group in Oakland and San Francisco, out of sheer frustration or broken moral sense, are not looking for a movement to change the political landscape in this country, but simply for an opportunity to break things.

Yeah, they're not even "Occupy", they're the same "Black Bloc" that's attached themselves to every single protest in SF & Oakland for as long as I've lived here and probably longer. They were around for the 1st Gulf war protests, the Rodney King Riots, the protests against Hongisto when he was police chief, the second Gulf War protests... if there is a protest with a lot of people they will latch on so they have cover before they go on their juvenile rampage.

They all probably live in Blackhawk...

It's a camping trip in the desert, not the redemption of the fallen world - Cryptofishist

I'm mostly ambivalent about Occupy, though a number of my so-called Friends think it's the bee's knees. But I do wonder, in the age of the internets with all its vast information & communication & gadgets, how can social/political movement people appear to be so utterly stupid? If you have infiltrators or really agro hangers-on, why camp or march with them? Why not design your actions within a trusted core group? Didn't civil rights groups and Act Up deal with this bullshit decades ago?

If you create a headless organization that anyone can join, that's what you get. You don't have to like it, but the vandals, thugs, and brick throwers are a part of the group until someone comes up with a better organizational structure.

Those Black Bloc jerks smashed up Toronto when the G8/G20 were here a few years ago. Then the police made things vastly worse -- basically, despite their ridiculously vast numbers (they trucked in cops from across the country), they allowed the BB to run amok one day, and then punished/abused peaceful protesters the next. It was horrible. (From a DnD nerd's perspective, and obviously grossly over-simplifying: chaotic evil vs. lawful evil). Those two events together did a lot to break the trust between various groups -- civilians, activists, police, left, right... -- and the city is still healing. Some of those Black Bloc were likely police agents provocateurs (sounds like a tinfoil-hat theory, but this has been proven in other, similar events), but I suspect most were, yeah, just angry people looking to smash things. Many of the hardest-hit businesses were Mom & Pop operations, hardly "big Capital" or the 1%!

Oddly, the Occupy movement, and the police response to it, ended up kind of helping with the healing here. Those protests were peaceful, and the local police actually cooperated with the protestors to a large extent (for example, using the "people's microphone" instead of a bullhorn to communicate with the crowd). In the end, when the police had to remove them from the city park where they'd been encamped for months, the eviction transpired peacefully and relatively quickly, with only one arrest and no charges laid, and no loss or damage to the protestors' property. Everyone was watching pretty closely, as the city was still very much on edge from the riots 2 years prior, and the city kind of breathed a collective sigh of relief at the end.

If you want drama to stop following you everywhere, try letting go of the leash.

The banking and finance industry is still only working for themselves, and still on the way to an inevitable crash.The next one will be worse.We are just as close to collapse as we were when we gave them more money.

Don't kid yourself that there is a safe place to invest.

They spent a billion dollars in a short time writing more laws for themselves.

They are setting us all up for a strong man that will take their shit, or revolution.

I think it's likely that the real fireworks with #Occupy will happen next spring after the election is settled. The election is a distraction that will prove strong against anything being settled this year.